I have sent your Name to the Library:1 so soon as any Committee-meeting is, your business will be completed, and Cochrane the Librarian will announce fact to you
and demand money. You will find it a very real convenience, I do expect, to be admitted freely to such an extent of Book-pasturage.
In regard to all but the ephemeral rubbish, which are in great demand, and which you can well dispense with, the access to
Books (I believe) is very fair; certainly there are many good Books in the Collection: bad rubbish Books too you can get,
French Novels &c &c in very great abundance; but you must be on the spot,—nay I believe you must even be a Lady,—for that.
Do not therefore attempt that!—

You may depend upon it Dryasdust is highly gratified with the notice taken of him.2 Pray sound him, from
the distance, and ascertain: I have still a great many Suffolk questions that I could ask him.— I am getting a little better
with my poor Cromwell in these days; I really must have done with it, if only to save my own life. It is still very frightful,—a dark Golgotha
as wide as the World; but here and there it does begin to get luminous, to get alive. Courage! I think it will be the joyfullest
feat for me I ever did, when the last tatter of it is fairly shaken off my fingers, and I am free again.

One day we had Alfred Tennyson here; an unforgettable day. He stayed with us till late; forgot his stick: we dismissed him with MacPherson's Farewell.3 MacPherson (see Burns) was a Highland robber; he played that Tune, of his own composition, on his way to the gallows; asked,
“If in all that crowd the MacPherson had any clansman?” holding up the fiddle that he might bequeath it to some one. “Any
Kinsman, any soul that wished him well?” Nothing answered, nothing durst answer. He crashed the fiddle under his foot, and
sprang off. The Tune is rough as hemp, but strong as a lion. I never hear it without something of emotion,—poor MacPherson;
tho' the Artist hates to play it. Alfred's dark face grew darker, and I saw his lips slightly quivering!— He said of you that
you were a man from whom one could take money; which was a proud saying, which you ought to thank Heaven for.4 It has struck me as a distinctly necessary act of legislature, That Alfred should have a Pension of £150 a year. They have
£1200 every year to give away. A hundred and fifty to Alfred, I say; he is worth that sum to England! It should be done, and must.5

2. At the head of the MS FitzGerald has noted: “‘Dryasdust,’ of next page, was D. E. Davy Esq: of Ufford, a polite handsome old
Gentleman, who had collected over 80 folios of Suffolk History, which he finally bequeathed to the British Museum. He supplied
Carlyle (at my request) with all the particulars he wanted about an Election of County Members at Ipswich 1640 and—was thanked in print under the name ‘Dryasdust.’” TC had in fact thanked “our Suffolk monitor” in a note: “D. E. Davy,
Esq., of Ufford, in that County, whose learning in Suffolk History is understood to be supreme, and whose obliging disposition
we have ourselves experienced” (Works 29:327). In subsequent notes, however, TC credited certain information to “Dryasdust Mss” (e.g., 29:327, 329, 330).

3. Robert Burns's version of “McPherson's Rant,” the ballad and tune supposedly composed by James Macpherson, cattle thief of
NE Scotland, before he was hanged at Banff, 1700.

4. This sentence has been crossed out by FitzGerald or someone else. It is just possible to make out what was written. A. Carlyle
omits it, and Terhune prints it without mentioning that it was crossed over. TC told C. E. Norton that FitzGerald had given
Tennyson £300 annually “in Tennyson's poor days” (Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. S. Norton and M. A. D. Howe [Boston, 1913] 1:465). For a discussion of FitzGerald's possible gifts, and doubts about the accuracy of TC's memory, see Terhune, LEF 1:459n.